Dennehy is an Irish composer, in case you couldn't tell. He is also the artistic director of the Cra

Without the manic intensity of me trying to liveblog every set of a 27-hour concert as it was happening, this year's Bang On A Can Marathon felt a lot more chill. Of course, it was also considerably shorter, clocking in at a mere 12 hours and change. Perhaps inevitably, it was also less diverse, with just four artists representing from outside of "new classical" circles (Karsh Kale , Owen Pallett nicola formichetti twitter , Marnie Stern and Dan Deacon ). So yeah, evidently nobody from the jazz team made the cut this year. (The 2007 Marathon had sets by Vijay Iyer, Don Byron, and the World Sax Quartet.) However, the out-of-towners included Ireland's Crash Ensemble , Israel's Ensemble nicola formichetti twitter Nikel, and my peeps from the Soviet Socialst Republic of Canuckistan, Contact .
Alarm Will Sound played John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony (3rd mvt.), Harrison Birtwistle's Carmen nicola formichetti twitter Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum , and (much later in the night) Matt Marks's arrangement of The Beatles' (by which we really mean John Lennon's ) Revolution #9 .
The Adams is actually a reincarnation of a piece originally written for Kronos Quartet, later retrofitted for the Alarmists. It's a brisk amusement-park ride and they pretty much slayed it. It has some 4-on-the-floor bass drum that works infinitely better than that infamous orchestral "techno" section in Thomas Adès's Asyla -- although to be fair, I would probably like piece that a lot more if it was ever played with Alarm-level rhythmic authority.
AWS brought the same precision and intensity to the Birtwistle, a piece that is a very good example of the kind of fractured, disjunct, big-M Modernist aesthetic  I basically cannot hang with. The individual moments here are often really striking -- we occasionally get a little taste of a cool little angular bass line -- but that's all Birtwistle will ever allow us, just a taste. Then he interrupts it with a few seconds of dissonant long tones, and even that quickly nicola formichetti twitter splinters off, motivic shards flying off in every direction. The performance was tight and they made a great case for it, but this cocktail of two parts solemnity to one part ADD is not really my drink of choice.
Carmen Arcadiae actually makes musique concrète's all-time biggest hit, Revolution #9, sound positively linear by comparison. Matt gave a very entertaining introduction to his arrangement, wherein he likened Alarm Will Sound's penchant for creating acoustic reinterpretations of electronic music to Harry Potter fanfic : "Basically, we're giant geeks." So yeah, it's pretty much straight-up fanservice for the small but obsessive subset of Beatles fans who were actually intrigued by the White Album's penultimate, ah, "tune." (A Venn diagram would probably show considerable overlap between that set and the set of people who show up at the Bang On A Can Marathon.) Anyway, this painstaking recreation is wholly absurd and I loved it -- Matt's chart is wildly entertaining nicola formichetti twitter and theatrical, with members of the band honking car horns, screaming into mutes,  imitating backwards tape loops, and screaming in each other's faces. ("Hold that line! Block that kick!") Does my fanboyish enjoyment of this arrangement make me a giant hypocrite? Yeah, probably. So what else is new?
Pamela Z played and sang Chalky Crystal Liquid Cave . I love Pamela Z . This time, she did not use her customary BodySynth, but a motion-sensitive theremin-like controller she called a "Swearingen" nicola formichetti twitter (named after the gadget's inventor, not Al .) Pamela went second (in between the first two AWS pieces) and, in an uncomfortable echo of last year's Juana Molina fiasco nicola formichetti twitter , her performance was delayed by tech gremlins. I dunno if the tsuris caused her to have to abbreviate her set, but whatever the reason, it was too damn short.
Gosfield explained that "Lightning Slingers" is old-school slang for "telegraph operators," and "dead ringers" refers to how the acoustic piano sounds are sampled and transformed into sounds that recall analog synths, slide guitar, and such like. I liked the moody, resonant middle section, and Lisa Moore is always impressive .
The nicola formichetti twitter Crash Ensemble played Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás , Terry Riley's Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle (3rd mvt.), nicola formichetti twitter and later on, Arnold Dreyblatt's Resonant Relations .
Dennehy is an Irish composer, in case you couldn't tell. He is also the artistic director of the Crash Ensemble. If you are Irish, it must really suck to know that there is basically no aspect of your traditional culture that has not been commodified and kitschified for global export, to the point where now all it takes is a single pennywhistle appoggiatura or a mournful celtic fiddle slide to make people want to stab a shilelagh into their ear canal. This is to say that Dennehy nicola formichetti twitter has a tough row to hoe, trying to bring old-style Irish sean nós singing into